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      1. Mission in Crisis

      It is fifty years since Mrs Rosa Parks, a black tailor’s assistant in a city centre department store in Montgomery, Alabama, in the deep south of the United States, boarded a bus and took a seat. When the bus filled up the driver ordered Mrs Parks to stand so that a white man could sit down. She refused to move: ‘She’d gone shopping after work, and her feet hurt. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to stand all the way home. The driver, of course, threatened to call the police. Go ahead and call them, Mrs Parks sighed. And she thought how you spend your whole life making things comfortable for white people. You just live for their well-being, and they don’t even treat you like a human being. Well, let the cops come. She wasn’t moving’ (Oats 1982, pp. 64–5).

      Mrs Parks was arrested and charged. She found support, though, from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and especially from one of its leaders in Montgomery, a young Baptist minister called Martin Luther King Jnr. He and other members of the association decided to call for a boycott of the bus company by the black community. Over forty church ministers and community leaders met in one of the city churches and gave their support to the idea. The boycott was launched a couple of days later and the response from the black community was unanimous – the buses were empty the following morning.

      This was the start of a protracted campaign, involving legal battles in court and rallying calls to the community to maintain the boycott. The campaign reached far into 1956, stirring up intense opposition in sections of the white community and periods of worry in the NAACP that the campaign would fail. King himself was arrested and fined at one point. But he was quite clear from the start that the protests were to be peaceful and to ‘be guided by the deepest principles of the Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal . . .’ The response from the black community was emphatic and the campaign became the defining moment of King’s life. He became a national celebrity, travelling across the United States to speak about the protest and drum up support. But the authorities in Montgomery were as defiant as ever and in early November succeeded in getting a judge to rule that the car pool, which black people had been using instead of the buses, was ‘a public nuisance’ and therefore illegal. After almost twelve months it seemed as if the protest had failed. But, at that very same moment, the Supreme Court in Washington ruled that the local laws in Alabama requiring segregation of races were unconstitutional. It was victory at last, a turning point in the way black people were regarded in the south and, indeed, across the country. The implementation of the ruling would take further struggle, especially when some black churches were blown up by white supremacists, but a threshold had been crossed.

      Mission as social action

      Why remember these events on their fiftieth anniversary? One reason is that at a time when many in the churches are looking for new ways to give mission expression (in response to ongoing decline in church attendance), these events vividly embody one form of missionary engagement. When many churches are drawing up mission strategies and action plans it is possible that Rosa Parks, the NAACP and Martin Luther King suggest an inspiring (and challenging) way forward.

      According to this view mission is about the coming of the kingdom of God, with its peace and justice and healing, to the dark places of the world. The work of the Church is to assist this wider mission in whatever ways it can, such as through supporting the civil rights movement in 1950s America. It is about Christians coming out of their bunkers and marching alongside others for an end to poverty and oppression. Whether or not the Church grows or declines is secondary to this. In words often attributed to Archbishop William Temple, the Church of God is the only institution that exists to serve the needs of those who are not its members, so Christian mission is about assisting with what God is doing in the world: mission is human development.

      But is this the right approach? How can God’s mission be assisted if there does not already exist a vibrant Church to do the assisting? How can his mission even be identified if his people are not gathering in church week by week to hear that mission described in the reading of Scripture? If significant energies are not devoted to building up the internal life of the Church how will it avoid losing itself in the struggles of the world? (See Chapter 9 for further discussion of this approach.)

      Mission as church growth

      A different outlook is found in the recent Church of England report Mission-Shaped Church. In its longest and most detailed chapter it provides a description of different kinds of congregational church life, which it describes as ‘fresh expressions of church’. It lists among others the following: alternative worship communities, café and cell churches, churches arising out of community initiatives, mid-week congregations, network churches, school-based congregations, church plants and traditional forms inspiring new interest. The report suggests that

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